San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
With hope, after ruins of the last four years
Four years ago, today, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. Eight days later, Nov. 16, my father died. Before the month was over, I was telling people that the worst of those two events was Trump’s election.
This wasn’t because of any difficulties between my father and me, of me not loving him or ever doubting his love for me. Dad was 77, had been sick for several months, and while his death was unexpected, it was imminent.
Dad’s death brought me grief. Trump’s election delivered me to despair.
Family and friends felt and continue to feel the pain of Dad’s death. Death and the passing of loved ones is a tragic but natural part of the normal cycle.
But that pain would be nothing compared to the millions of people who’d suffer under a Trump presidency. There was nothing natural about electing an abnormally awful human being whose insatiable need to denigrate and humiliate anyone was matched by his perpetual whining of those who’d been “very unfair” to him.
Then came four years of Trump not caring enough about the job of presidency to do study and work; four years of daily lies and boasting; four years of bullying; four years of insulting, belittling any human being who wasn’t a tyrant: widows of slain soldiers, Gold Star parents, frontline workers fighting coronavirus; Black athletes, Muslims, Mexican Americans; prisoners of war; deceased prisoners of war; U.S. servicemen and women killed in duty; women; women journalists; Black women journalists; Black, Puerto Rican and Muslim congresswomen; entire states.
Four years of his emboldening white nationalist groups and his refusal to condemn any of their acts of violence just as he’s cowardly refused to confront Vladimir Putin over bounties on American soldiers and his other schemes to hurt the United States.
Who needs foreign interference to damage American institutions when the American president has been doing it for four years, including now, as he lies about an election he lost and makes the most dangerous and disgusting attempt to undermine trust in our democracy.
If there’s but one issue for which Trump should be expelled from the White House it’s his lying, incompetence and disregard
about COVID-19 and its wreckage of millions of lives in this country. Treating COVID-19 as if it were part of a conspiracy against his re-election, Trump claimed that no one would be talking about COVID-19 on Nov. 4.
On Nov. 4, the U.S. hit the 100,000 daily mark in new cases. On Nov. 5, it rose to 120,000. Trump will do nothing as he pouts and incites violence over the election.
During the Nazi occupation of France, writer Albert Camus edited an underground newspaper named Combat. When Paris was liberated in 1944, the future winner of the Nobel Prize for literature for novels like “The Stranger” and “The Plague” wrote four essays addressing an
imaginary German friend and explaining that he wasn’t opposed to Germans but to Nazism.
In the first letter, Camus wrote about what France had been through, but looked forward to what it could become.
“I belong to a nation,” Camus wrote. “Which for the past four years has begun to relive the course of her entire history and which is calmly and surely preparing out of the ruins to make another history and to take her chance in a game where she holds no trumps. This country is worthy of the difficult and demanding love that is mine.
“And I believe she is decidedly worth fighting for since she is worthy of a higher love. And I say that your nation, on the other hand, has received from its sons only the love it deserved, which was blind. A nation is not justified by such love. That will be your undoing. And you who were already conquered in your greatest victories, what will you be in the approaching defeat?”
The United States will soon have no Trumps in power to loot, debase, tarnish and diminish it. But 70 million voters looked at Trump’s behavior over the past four years and said they wanted four more years. He will leave. His legacy won’t.
No country or leader deserves blind, uncritical love. Those wishing to give it to them should ask themselves why.
Over the past four years, whether horrified by family separations at the border, the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor or the growing threat of white nationalist violence, well-meaning people have said, “This is not who we are as a nation.”
It is. And many of us have known that for centuries. Yet we love this country. As Camus felt for France, we feel about the United States, that it’s worthy of the difficult and demanding love that is ours.
Though bruised and disappointed, it’s with hope that we prepare out of the ruins of the last four years to make another history. A better history.